Album Review: Fat Guy Wears Mystic Wolf Shirt - Dys/Closure

Ever since Pig Destroyer ripped the underground a new asshole with Phantom Limb there's been a fundamental shift in the way bands approach grindcore and grindcore-adjacent tuneage. Post-2007 grind bands started to ditch the genre's hallmarked brevity. Hell, even Agoraphobic Nosebleed are writing tracks these days that go for a whole minute.

New South Wales three-piece Fat Guy Wears Mystic Wolf Shirt pay little to no heed to the trend to elongate grind on their second full-length Dys/Closure; of the album's 15 tracks less than half actually manage to find their way past the 60-second mark. Instead it seems like every new track on Dys/Closure has started and hammer-smashed you in the face before you can finish reading the song title on the back of the CD. Banging through track after track, Dys/Closure moves at a frenetic pace, but it never feels like an indiscernible blur. Fat Guy Wears Mystic Wolf Shirt hold everything together; there's a cagey unease that underpins the entire record, and the riffs, even in sub-40 second noise bursts like Mimic and Quotidian, are meaty enough to sink your canines into.

When Fat Guy Wears Mystic Wolf Shirt do venture beyond the 60-second mark, they sound like a virulent homage to turn of the millennium experimental hardcore. There are notes of Botch and Coalesce within the maelstrom of album closer Within and a fury reminiscent Burnt By The Sun in the chaotic, angular freak outs of N Equals. Capturing the band's adeptness at both spazz-grind bursts and roomier tracks, Dys/Closure is an excellent showcase of a dextrous band doing whatever the hell they feel like doing.